EVERGREEN REVIEW

A lively anthology of an archly contrarian, occasionally semi-pornographic, and highly influential magazine over its three decades.

Editor Thomas, a learned student of all things ’60s, makes a strong case for Barney Rosset and his Evergreen Review as key agents of the era’s evolving culture, politics, media, and entertainment: “Barney has not been properly acknowledged for morphing the sociopolitical terrain of the 1960s and early 70s. Along with the folks like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, Barney Rosset created the 1960s.” The 1957 debut issue was suggestive of that era-shaping mission: It contained an excerpt from Ginsberg’s new poem Howl, a piece by Ralph Gleason on San Francisco jazz, a prose piece by the pre–On the Road Jack Kerouac, and works by many other Beat luminaries. Suggestive, too, was the fact that Cuban nationalists, put out by the review’s glorification of Fidel and Che, fired an RPG into Rosset’s Grove Press office, an act that “eloquently testified to Rosset’s capacity to provoke American sensibilities.” Thomas’ anthology hits on many high points, including an essay by Brion Gysin explaining his cut-up method of composition; Norman Mailer’s testimony at the Boston obscenity trial of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch; and even the American debut of the French cartoon Barbarella, soon to be a major motion picture. It was in Rosset’s pages that Ezra Pound lamented to Ginsberg his “stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism,” that Dennis Hopper detailed how the iconic film Easy Rider came to be, and that Twiggy revealed…well, more than readers had seen before, anyway. Jorge Luis Borges, Kay Boyle, Eldridge Cleaver, Bernadette Devlin: Every issue (and Thomas reproduces the covers of all of them) was a trove for readers, political activists, and fans of popular culture then and now.

An enjoyable and illuminating stroll down a countercultural memory lane.